The blog for the cult Manhattan cable-access TV show that offers viewers the best in "everything from high art to low trash... and back again!" Find links to rare footage, original reviews, and reflections on pop culture and arthouse cinema.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

It's been a few weeks
now since Karen Black's death, and I've been trying to think of what
to say to summarize her career, her life, and the short time I spent
in her presence doing one of the strangest Funhouse interviews ever.First let me say that the
run of great films she made between 1969 and '76 constitutes a really incredible body of work. She played a range of characters, from
sharp to dumb, city girl to country hick, glamor girl to
ugly duckling. Over the next three and a half decades she had an
occasional good role, but the fascinating films she made in that
seven-year period are her greatest legacy.

As for her life, I know
only what I read about her. Her final months were spent combating a
terrible sickness, reaching out to her fans for financial help (the
tragedy of America's healthcare situation – we are the only “first
world” country without nationalized care – remains the single
most backward and awful aspect of our country). She worked steadily
over the past four decades, appearing in a major amount of disposable
genre pics, but every so often would get a featured role in an indie
film that was worth watching. There weren't many, but they did
appear....As for my interview, it
was indeed a “strained” affair for its first half. If I have the
time I do like reviewing the subject's career – with Black that
entailed asking her first about the lurid Herschel Gordon Lewis
movie The Prime Time (1959). She acted for the
first time onscreen in that film – she told me she was 12 and still
living at home, but she was actually 20 and didn't have another film
role until the absolutely wonderful 1966 Coppola NYC comedy You're a Big Boy
Now (costarring, among others, the great Julie Harris, who died just
this past weekend).

The interview continued
to hit speed bumps – the oddest being an interruption that made it
seem like she'd have to go entirely. Instead we began again and for
whatever reason, her answers began to be more expansive, a bit more
friendly, and refreshingly honest. As when she dismissed about a
decade of her films and when she noted “that there are good horror
movies and bad horror movies, but most of them are bad” – a truth
I'm sure she learned firsthand.The best moments of our
chat were when she discussed the craft of acting and the work she had
done with exceptional directors (Rafelson, Altman, Hitchcock). Some
years back when I was putting together a “demo reel” for the
Funhouse, I included this small sliver of our chat, in which she
talked about ad-libbing in Nashville.

Here, however, is the
rest of what she had to say about Robert Altman, who I fervently believe was and is
one of the greatest American filmmakers of all time. Much has been
said about improvisation on his sets, but I had never heard a
performer discuss his lack of marks for the actors.

This came about when
she talked about the play and movie Come Back to the Five
and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. I'm very, very glad I had
the experience of seeing the Broadway production of the show directed
by Altman. I went to a Wednesday matinee of the show, filled with
little old ladies sitting around looking bewildered. One of the
blue-haired attendees was in fact so bored she broke out her
knitting.

I loved the show and
was particularly taken with the way it was set up: when the actors
were in the front of the stage they were in the present (the mid-1970s),
when they went to the back, they were in the past (the mid-1950s). Most
of the old ladies couldn't figure this out, and absolutely all of
them were confused by the absence of Cher (who was onstage from the
curtain going up, but was dressed "down" as a waitress). When Karen Black entered as the glamorous
transgender character a few of them audibly said, "that's her...
that's Cher!"

The play had a short
run of 52 performances on Broadway and was turned into the first of Altman's “filmed
plays” in 1983 (he shot the film on Super-16 converted to 35mm and
secured the budget from, among others, Mark Goodson Productions). He
took the special step of carefully delineating the two time periods
in the film – when the characters are seen in a mirror they are
indeed in the past (in different outfits that show they are younger;
onstage they simply acted younger and were, again, in the back part
of the set).The film still isn't on DVD in the U.S. But
copies of it are still circulating on VHS and on the “torrential”
side of the Net from foreign TV.

Here is what Ms. Black
said about being directed by Altman, first in Nashville
and then again in Come Back to the Five and Dime.....

Monday, August 19, 2013

In
its quest to recreate the magical mayhem (read: long lines and big $)
that accompanied the 2011 Alexander McQueen exhibit, the folks at the
Met conceived of “Punk: From Chaos to Couture,” a truly
ridiculous tribute to what was a lively and often ugly “movement”
distinguished by its anti-fashion and back-to-basics attitude.

I
am reviewing this uncommonly "pretty!" tribute to an intentionally
garish way of dressing and accessorizing — that was inextricably linked with an important musical movement —
a few days after it has closed. But I’ve noticed that The
New York Times frequently “gets around” to reviewing
art exhibits just as they’re closing (more fun to make the rabble
scamper to something interesting), so if they who are paid can do
that, I can most certainly conduct a post-mortem on the punk show for
the no-pay that blogging confers upon its participants.

I
was underaged when punk hit NYC, but the “fashion,” if it should
be called that, was everywhere, and the music was indeed getting
airplay on certain fringe radio stations (I vividly remember a show
called “Punk-o-rama” on WHBI at the top of the FM dial – “rip
up my school books/tear down the dirty looks/this/is punk-a-rama!”).
By the time I was attending concerts “new wave” music was in full
effect – these shows took place in venues with no liquor license.

In
the decades since that galvanizing explosion – which took some time
to be heard in other parts of the world (thus the docu title 1991:
the Year Punk Broke) – it's become apparent to anyone who
listens to the music that there were excellent punk bands and many,
many shitty ones. There were people grouped under the punk umbrella
who didn't make “punk rock” at all (Blondie, Television, even Patti Smith).
It was a musical movement that thrived on the live concert
experience, but those concerts are long gone (as are the venues), and
so the “summing up” began as early as the late Eighties.

And
then there was the fashion. As with hippie fashion, it was basically
dressing “down,” wearing shitty clothing that shocked older folk,
getting jarring haircuts and affecting whatever was the utter
opposite of the hippie/hard rock look (long hair, bell bottoms,
sideburns, halter tops, whatever). It was rebellion pure and simple,
and it fed off of the rebellion of the past. And like past rebellious
movements, it gave birth to a bunch of shit culture in its wake. When
a rebellious sense of fashion is codified, it officially is dead
(even though wildly colored mohawks were still seen in the Village up
until the early Nineties).

What
the Met programmers did with their little punk outing was to show how
“ugly fashion” was transformed into “pretty!” dresses
and ensembles. They wanted to show how the punk movement lived on,
but instead they emphasized how its worst poser aspects influenced
subsequent generations of posers. They acknowledged the music, but
truly rooted the show in the fashion world – all the better to
recapture that McQueen vibe (his stuff was present in the very first
room of the exhibit, natch – and I did like his crazy-ass goth-meets-H.R. Giger exhibit, by the way).

So
you entered and saw a recreation of the CBGB men's bathroom – oh,
for the sweet cuteness of a disgusting toilet recreated as a museum
exhibit (idea for true modern art experience: not only visual input,
but *smell* and stickiness on the bottom of the shoes score points
for verisimilitude). And not even rendered in its truly, truly
graffiti-covered nastiness (the source photo used was from
early on in the club's existence – that men's room was fucking
disgusting, and therein lay the “mystique” of the place. Life
as it lived, no prettifying anything ever, deal with it or go home).

That
little intentionally shabby nook was followed by several rooms of
punk fashion, progressing from a recreation of Vivienne Westwood's
shop “Clothes for Heroes” to several groupings of dresses and
outfits that looked weird and spacey (paging Alex Mc), and finally
ending with items created for Dolce and Gabbana and Dior in the 2000s
that were “inspired” by punk.

Gone
was the shocking, disturbing, and abrasive edges of the homemade punk
look. As with most haute couture, this stuff could never be worn on
the streets of any city anywhere, and if it was you wouldn't wind up
bleeding for your troubles (or having the fabric tear).

Surrounding
the fashions were some punk sounds (the most famous artists from NYC
and London), plus filmed images on video – of which the only one
that was truly jarring was a person in a bondage mask (or was it a
scuba mask – who the fuck knows, it was jarring and that's all that
mattered) in some cityscape standing around being generally weird and
impressively disturbing. The walls had graffiti on them: mottos like
“Destroy Capitalism,” “Punk is a revolution for countries that
don't allow revolution,” and other items like that.

Throughout
the five or so rooms of high fashion, one got the distinct feeling
that the only way to make the show “legitimate” would be
to have the galleries trashed by people who had a true sense of
artistic vandalism (a fashion show based on punk is dying for a
Magic Christian-like statement in which everyone
who enters the gallery gets randomly gobbed on or some such).
Graffiti slogans and cleaned-up digital video doesn't quite convey
the anarchy and randomness of whatever could be called the punk
“ethos.”

I
saw Brian Eno speak at MoMA back in the Nineties during a “High and
Low” art exhibit, and he lamented that Duchamp's Fountain – the
famous toilet with the name “R. Mutt” inscribed on it –
couldn't be used for its initial purpose. He mused on the fact that
it was under glass (in that show – subsequently I'm sure I've seen it
out in plain air) and secured from the touch of bystanders.

He
fantasized about getting urine in the bowl and thereby cheering up
Duchamp, and anyone who had a sense of humor and playfulness (and
utilitarianism). The closest the punk exhibit got to any sort of
acknowledgment that punk clothing was CHEAP clothing by its very
nature were the wall-texts that explained the derivation of punk,
including John Rotten's famous quote that “when the arse of your
pants falls out, you use safety pins.”

So,
what did tourists experience? A quaint look at a long-ago pop-culture
movement that rebelled against everything that was mainstream, and was
(as per the usual) gobbled up by the mainstream and transformed into
something “pretty!” and worthy of aesthetic consideration. It was
bullshit, but then again Orson reminded us in F for Fake
about the question the Devil himself asked when he saw the first man
make the first crude drawing: “it's good... but is it art?”

The
last word on this artistic farrago – where one of the more
affordable items in the gift shop was a set of pencils with quotes
from Sid Vicious on 'em (!) – was provided by a guy who I am *sure*
never went to the exhibit and also never was the biggest fan of punk.
But he was around at the time, and he respected the rebellion enough
to summarize cogently what the Met's exhibit “meant.” Read the
words of decoder of popular culture tropes (and one of America's best
writers) Nick Tosches writing for style.com. A few paragraphs (read the whole article here):

"Have
you ever read a definition or description of any kind of music, be it
plainsong or punk? Lifeless and untelling compared with hearing even
just a few breaths of the music itself.

"Nobody can say
where it came from or where it went, and we should beware always of
those who would bring sociology or any other ology to rock 'n' roll.

"[...]Thus,
we have Punk: Chaos to
Couture at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not the Museum of Modern Art, but the big
one. The vast Gothic Revival mausoleum of the greatness of the ages.
Giotto, Botticelli, Raphael, Rembrandt, mummified Egyptian guys. The
big one.

"Museums. "Art
appreciation." If you have to be taught to appreciate something,
it can't be much good. Who ever heard of sex appreciation, drug
appreciation, pork-chop appreciation? I shall not forget being asked
to extinguish my cigarette at the Apocalypse
exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2000. Welcome to the end
of the world: No smoking allowed."

Epilogue:
Research shows that the theme song to that “punk-a-rama” was the
product of a Kim Fowley prefab, post-Runaways teen guy-fronting-girl-band combo,
Venus and the Razorblades. My fond memories of this defiant ode, as
is always the case, are tarnished (or at least made into quaint
kitsch) by the reality involved – kinda like mindset that
produced the Met show. Jeezis, this is a ridiculous ditty, kinda
like the “Life is a Rock (but the radio rolled me)” of punk.
Enjoy (if ya can):

******

As
I walked through the punk exhibit, I did begin to wonder if there was
a fitting “punk anthem,” since the music chosen by the Met was
painfully obvious. There are many, many seminal punk tunes, all of
which could be declared to present the punk “sound” (right,
right, there WAS NO punk sound, it was a conglomeration of influences
and rebellions against arena rock and “album-oriented” MOR).

Iggy's
“I want to be your dog” is probably the archetypal punk tune (the
live versions, without the lovely bells), but there are several other
songs that could qualify as anthemic punk tunes.

First
and foremost, the Dead Boys' “Sonic Reducer.” The influences are
here (Iggy, Yardbirds and the louder Sixties British bands), but
everything else is new. And short, man – short songs were the very
essence of punk:

The
Sex Pistols were either the epitome of a punk band (esp. with the
inclusion of the absolutely unable-to-play El Sid) or the ultimate
concept in fake entertainment by Mr. McLaren. Whatever the case is,
John Lydon's hooks are still catchy, and you can't possibly fault a
band that sings the immortal lines “We're so pretty/oh so
pretty/vacant.”

When
it comes to bands that transcended the label punk, the Clash are the
prime example. The tension between Joe Strummer's pure and simple
rock 'n' roll and Mick Jones' refined pop songsmithing produced some
eternally playable albums. As for their punk anthem?

A key song in any history of punk is the item below from
X-Ray Spex. It is incredibly important because it voices the female teen’s
point of view, something which was not heard much in punk. The
late, great Poly Styrene wrote and sang the song, which is as close to a
teenage cri de coeuras you’re going to get during the punk era
(yes, yes, Poly was actually 20 when the single came out, but it distills
everything that repulses teens about adult culture).

Poly’s lyric rejects men’s oppression of women and age’s
oppression of youth, but she could equally have been talking about the bondage
strain in “punk fashion.” Her own outfits were pure thrift-store style —
it’s hard to imagine her being chosen by Westwood as a model for her duds.

Those music producers packaging “punky chick” teen pop-tarts
(looking at you, Avril Lavigne) might wanna take a listen, just so you know
what you’re ignoring:

The
Met had certain individuals spotlighted as “poster children” for
the punk exhibit. The key figures who wound up on the merchandise
they were selling in the gift shop (I'm talking refrigerator magnets
in addition to postcards) were Debbie Harry (alluring, a great
singer, but punk – ??) and Richard Hell.

Hell
is a fascinating subject, in that he did create some great music and
has established himself as a fine writer and reviewer in the years
since his music career dissipated or was suspended, or whatever went
on there. The song has been labeled his ultimate statement by
critics is this snappy ode (which McLaren admitted had inspired
“Pretty Vacant”), “The Blank Generation”:

What
makes it hard to declare the above a true punk anthem is that its
melody and concept were swiped from a novelty record (or is the
claiming of someone else's work part of the artistic statement?). Bob
McFadden and “Dor” (Rod McKuen) had a big novelty hit with “The
Mummy” in 1959, and around the same time released a single called
“The Beat Generation.” Hell appropriated the tune and the concept
and is still listed as sole composer of “Blank Generation.” I
love his lyrics for “Blank,” but it's wild to compare the two and
realize that one is a direct swipe of the other:

I
would also put into contention as an anthem this ditty by the Cramps
that in 1979 already acknowledges the poser component of a lot of
punk in its opening lines (“You ain't no punk, you punk/you wanna
talk about the real junk...”).

I
have an endless admiration for Lux Interior and the exquisite
and talented Ms. Ivy Rorshach, and there is something timeless about
all the great recordings by the Cramps. Their style was more
“psycho-billy” than punk musically, but their approach was
minimalist, absolutely pure rock 'n' roll – and they wore their
influences on their sleeves so wonderfully that it's no doubt that
they (and Lenny Kaye – all credit to those who matter) who really
spearheaded the “Underground Garage” concept decades before that
radio enterprise began. This is garage, and it is punk also (and
yeah, the video is the template for a lot of goth):

Patti
Smith's music wavered between brilliant hook-driven rock and pure
poetry (obviously). The closest she came to providing a punk anthem
of sorts is “Rock and Roll Nigger,” a song that never got air
play for obvious reasons. It combines her poetry, her concern for all
things aesthetic and beautiful (not “pretty!” mind you, but
beautiful), it has a hook to kill for, plus it's very minimal and
angry. The fact that the song ends with the refrain “outside of
society...” sez it all:

The
only place to end this is with the band who are identified by most as
being the ultimate punk icons. Again, their music was very different
from basic punk – they combined surf, bubble gum, garage, and the
bliss of sailing right through a set. All the acts above were terrific (I am an addict for them all), but it's hard to pick
a more goddamned FUN band than the Ramones.

And,
screw fashion, Joey and crew dressed in torn jeans because they were
goofy, no-budget guys from Queens. All hail the guys whose records
were never played on the radio, but we loved 'em so (fuck that –
love 'em, present tense). Now the t-shirt with the emblem designed by
the late Arturo Vega is *everywhere* on the streets of every major
city, and they are seen as “stylemakers.” Life is funny, fashion
pathetic.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

In this part of my tribute to Bernadette Lafont I turn to the traces of her films that can be found "hidden in plain sight" online. As noted in the
first part of this piece, I found out in my interview with Mme.
Lafont that she didn’t particularly enjoy working on the Truffaut
short Les mistons (1957) because it didn’t fit in with
her idea of “Hollywood” moviemaking (and also because her
husband, the actor Gerard Blain, was opposed to her having an acting
career). Here is the short, which is very enjoyable (and Lafont is a
vision, at the tender age of 18):

The Truffaut short
was far from the world of movies that she enjoyed, so the next
obvious step was starring in a feature. When I asked Lafont about her
first meeting with Chabrol, I was interested to hear that she had a
different story than is told in the French TV documentary that is on
the Le Beau Serge (1958) Criterion disc.

There it is noted by
Chabrol that his wife (whose inheritance allowed her to finance
Serge) loved Bernadette in Mistons
and suggested her for the female lead in Serge.
Lafont herself said she had met Chabrol when she went to Cannes with
her husband, and so she and Blain were cast in both the Truffaut
short and the Chabrol film at the same time.

The YT poster was turned on the
“femdom” aspect, but for the minute let’s set the fetish aspect
aside (in researching the clips with Lafont online I also discovered
that various YT posters have uploaded clips of European actresses
strictly because their armpit hair is briefly visible in the scenes
in question).

Serge
is considered the first true New Wave feature film (unless you want
to count Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1955), which
wasn’t a hit). It impresses to this day, thanks to strong acting by
the three leads (Blain, Lafont, and New wave mainstay Jean-Claude
Brialy) and its harsh but authentic portrait of a small working-class
town.

The next landmark in
her career is another film by Chabrol, the ensemble piece Les
Bonnes Femmes (1960), which is not only one of its
director’s finest, but one of the best French films ever made (I
wrote about it in my obit for Chabrol). The whole film can be found here with English subtitles:

Watching the film is
an incredibly emotional experience, as it moves back and forth
between extremely light moments and very dark ones. This is an
in-between one, and one of the best-ever depictions of boredom at
work on film:

I also asked Mme.
Lafont about Chabrol’s strange and wonderful failure Les
Godelureaux (1961), in which she plays a seductress
summoned by a dandy (Brialy again) to destroy a young man who has
pissed him off.

The film is now available in its entirety on YT with English subs, and it is quite a
“discovery” from this period of Chabrol’s work: Lafont is red
hot as the seductress, but the fact that her character is a fantasy
figure (a red-hot female Tyler Durden, without the brawling) was
something she emphasized to me in my interview; this of course (as
with Fight Club) begs the question of all the
times she is seen in public by people other than the lead character
and Brialy. Whatever the case may be, it’s a fascinating Sixties
pic.

There were a number
of films I would’ve liked to ask Lafont about, including the comedy
L’amour c’est gai, l’amour c’est triste (1971), a
charming effort by the director Jean-Daniel Pollet. Pollet’s work
is split into two categories: gorgeously non-linear film “poems”
and narrative comedies and drama (L’amour fits in
the latter category).

Claude Melki (a
favorite of Pollet) plays a schlemiel who doesn’t quite understand
that his sister (Lafont) is a hooker. He finally finds a girlfriend —
the adorable Chantal Goya from Masculin-Feminin —
and the farce gets cuter and siller. This clip has no English subs, unfortunately.

One of the most
intricate and important films Lafont was involved in was Rivette’s
13-hour masterpiece Out 1 (1971). You can see her
response to my question about improvisation in the creation of the film below, in the first part of this blog entry, but I thought at least one clip from the film
featuring Bernadette should be included online.

Thus, this excerpt of
a scene where Michael Lonsdale tries to get her to return to Paris to
join his theater troupe (and reveals that she is one of the mysterious "Thirteen" that Jean-Pierre Leaud has stumbled onto):

Lafont was
constantly working during her 56-year film career. So while she was
making deadly serious countercultural masterpieces, she also was
appearing in charming farces like Trop
Jolies Pour Etre Honnetes (1972), an all-female comedy caper that
also featured Funhouse interview subject Jane Birkin and Serge
Gainsbourg. The trailer is here.

My final question to
her concerned her reunion with Truffaut, Such a Gorgeous Kid
Like (1972), based on a novel by Henry Farrell (What
Ever Happened to Baby Jane?). The film is a rather odd item for
Truffaut, a broad farce about an amoral woman that has some wonderful
moments. Lafont couldn’t sing but turned that into a comedic advantage,
as when she belts the film’s title song. Here is the trailer:

One of Lafont’s
“greatest hits” as an actress was her starring role in Jean
Eustache’s minimalist masterwork The Mother and the Whore
(1973), which qualifies as perhaps the last great French New Wave
film (although Eustache was younger than the original crew and the
film was made a decade after they stopped making films like this).

Lafont plays the
“mother” part of the equation, the woman who lives with
Jean-Pierre Leaud and tolerates his affair with a young nurse.
Eustache’s film needs to be out on DVD in America (when it was last
heard of, it was on VHS from New Yorker Films, the firm that had very erratic VHS/DVD release practices).

At the moment this is being
written, the film can only be obtained in America with English subs via the old
New Yorker 2-VHS set and the UK DVD (or off of the infamous
Torrents). The film can be found in its entirety with Spanish subs here and in French with no English subs.

Here is a quiet,
contemplative sequence in which Lafont listens to a Piaf song. The
brilliance of Eustache's film lies in his dialogue and also in
interludes like this one:

Jumping ahead to the
Eighties, one see Bernadette turning into a character person, camping
it up in pictures like Just Jaeckin's The Perils of Gwendoline (1984) and winning a Cesar as Best Supporting
Actress (she also received a Lifetime Achievement Cesar in 2003) for
playing a nanny to the very sassy Charlotte Gainsbourg in
L’Effrontee (1985), directed by Funhouse guest
Claude Miller. Here is the trailer for the film.

Bernadette worked
with Chabrol again in the late Seventies and Eighties (appearing in
Violette, Inspecteur Lavardin,
and Masques). Her daughter Pauline also became a
popular movie star in the Eighties, appearing in Chabrol's Poulet
Au Vinegre (the sequel to Lavardin) and
Godard's Keep Your Right Up. Pauline sadly died in
1988 (at the age of 25) while on a camping trip. A tribute to her can be seen here.

A film I have not
seen, but which some helpful poster has put up in several shards
(Bernadette's scenes only), is Olivier Peyon's Les Petites
Vacances (2006). In the film Lafont plays a grandmother who
takes her grandkids on a road trip without telling their parents.
There is a wonderful scene with Claude Brasseur and a very taut scene toward the end of the film, but this particular sequence explains the
dilemma that is behind the film.

One of Lafont's
final starring roles was in the comedy-drama Paulette
(2012), where she played an old woman who becomes a pot dealer to
earn money. (The trailer is here.) A very affectionate TV documentary
about her can be found here (no English subtitles).

*****

Lafont was fearless
as a performer, and nowhere was this more apparent than when she
sang. She was off-key, but amiable and sexy enough to still please
the viewer. The first musical clip I found is from Les
Idoles (1968), a broad comedy in which she appears as
“Soeur Hilarite” (a play on the name of the Singing Nun,
Soeur Sourire [Sister Smile]). The rock band
accompanying her definitely tag this as the late Sixties:

Truffaut said he
felt that the character in the book Such a Gorgeous Kid Like
Me was just like Bernadette (this becomes a rather odd observation when you consider that the character is not just a clever sexpot, she's also a liar and a
crook....). To promote the film, she sang the theme song on a French
TV show. Again, waaaay out of key, but still adorable:

And for the piece de
resistance, an incredibly silly musical number that seems to have
first appeared in a children's TV show, "La sieste de
papa." Listen to that synthesizer, and remember that the
Eighties truly were a “lost” decade for everyone.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

She may not have been well known in the U.S., but Bernadette
Lafont was a star in France and made quite an impression on those international
viewers who saw her onscreen. She transformed several times throughout her
career — from youthful sexpot and star of New Wave features, to daring hippie
performer (appearing in several experimental works that are still jarring as
hell), to respected actress, and finally senior “character person.” She appeared
in over 150 films and TV-movies, but is best-remembered for a handful of
performances that were indeed career-defining.

I had the opportunity in April 2012 to conduct an interview with
Mme. Lafont where I was barely able to graze her long career but was thoroughly
charmed by her honesty and irreverent take on her costars, directors, and
career. Upon hearing a few weeks back about her death at 74 in her hometown of Nîmes, I set
about writing this tribute, which has grown to two parts.

First the interview: it was done in conjunction with a
festival of her films at the Alliance Francaise (FIAF) in Manhattan. One of
the more interesting notes we returned to throughout the half-hour we spoke was
that some of her best-remembered upbeat films were no fun to make (as with the
Truffaut short Les Mistons), and one of the most sad and
disturbing films she starred in, Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes
— she instantly volunteered that it was a “masterpiece” — was a ball to shoot.

She loved watching movies growing up and got her chance to
enter the acting profession when she met the fledgling New Wave directors
through her first husband, “the French James Dean,” actor Gerard Blain.
Truffaut cast her as the female lead (opposite Blain) in Les
Mistons (1957); her character is a leggy free spirit who is obsessed
over by a group of young boys (one of whom sniffs her bicycle seat in one of
the film’s more “adult” moments).

I asked her about the short and got some interesting replies.
The translator used the third person when translating Mme. Lafont’s remarks:

The interview was scheduled for a half-hour, but I realized
that by the 25-minute mark we were still in the early Sixties chronologically.
I then quickly asked three questions about three films that she starred in, two
of which are inarguable masterworks. Now that she has “left this mortal coil,”
I’m very glad I was able to ask those final questions. Here is her response
about working with Jacques Rivette on the brilliant, immersive Out 1
(1971):

Thursday, August 1, 2013

Lord Buckley was a one-of-a-kind performer, a comedian who
doted on language and precise wording. I’m assuming most readers of this blog
knew who he was, but for the uninitiated I’ll just say that he was a pre-Lenny Bruce
standup who could be better described as a spoken-word artist, since his
routines were comprised of poems, myths, and literary evergreens transformed by
his fertile and indelible use of jazz-musician slang.

The good Lord (full name: Richard Buckley) was a distinguished-looking white gent who was thought to be black by those who never got to see him in nightclubs or in his few brief forays on television. Although his work would seem to be rooted firmly in its time period, it remains fresh and vibrant today because of his beautifully colorful way with words and his delivery, which ranged from a rather high-toned. British-sounding erudition to a low-down growling voice that lingers forever in the minds of those who have heard it.

Buckley occupies a singular place in several spheres. In
comedy his “hipsemantic” language surely influenced Lenny Bruce, and his verbal
inflections can be heard in a LOT of George Carlin. For a pure illustration of
George doing Buckley, check out the Toledo Window Box LP.

One also hears Buckley in Captain Beefheart’s delivery of
his spoken-word pieces; the good Captain’s friend Frank Zappa made
certain that when he got his Straight record label, one of the first albums he
put out was a collection of then-rare Buckley tracks (as a most immaculately hip artistocrat). Tom Waits has also namechecked the
Lord several times as an early influence.

Buckley’s work was also a clear foreshadowing of the verbal playfulness of Kerouac and company in the Beat Generation (Buckley’s greatest
routines were developed in the early to mid Fifties, while the Beats’ “greatest
hits” all appeared toward the end of the decade).

I had thought that there was no performance footage
of Buckley in existence, but one of the best aspects of YouTube is the fact
that diehard fans are willing to share their obscure acquisitions. And thus I
put up a blog post in 2007 noting that there finally was footage of Buckley in
public view. It turns out that another helpful soul has added to this small
trove of treasures, so I decided to completely update my old post (which also
made sense since one of the key entries has now gone down).

The two best video intros to the Lord are the two clips that
have been up the longest. This slice from the documentary Chicago:
First Impressions of a Great American City (1960) shows him
performing one of the key moments in his “hip” account of that Jesus guy, “The
Nazz” (which can be heard in its entirety here).:

The other great intro to Buckley is his appearance on
Groucho’s You Bet Your Life. Groucho is a great straight-man
for him — first tagging him as a con-artist (or, more precisely, a traveling
performer) and then giving him all due respect when it comes time for him to do
a bit of his version of Marc Antony’s funeral oration (audio of the full routine can be found here), which starts off with the phrase I used as the title of this blog entry:

– a wild reworking of Poe's “The Raven” (“when you don't
want the bird/when you don't need the bird/when you haven't got the first
possible USE for the bird/[mouth noise indicating time passed] that's when you
get it...”)

– one of my favorite longer pieces by the Lord, “The Bad Rapping of the Marquis de Sade,” is only available on YT as performed by a
Buckley impersonator, Rod Harrison (who does a great job with his impression,
but loses a bit of the “regal” faux-British aspect to Buckley's delivery).

If you're heard some or all of the above, then you're ready
for the “next level” of rarities now found on YT, a series of TV clips in which
Buckley did his other acts, which were indeed vaudeville-type turns that
predominantly revolved around his raspy, black-sounding voice. The earliest
available footage of him comes from the ABC series Club 7 in
1949. He does a Louis Armstrong impression and an early spoken-word piece:

I recently went to the Paley Center and was thrilled to see
there are indeed copies of a few Steve Allen Tonight Show
eps (Steve often spoke about how the tapes for his years on Tonight had been wiped).

This particular segment from 1955 was a bit of a surprise, as Buckley does not
do his verbal routines, but instead does a spoof of acrobatic acts with three
gents from Steve’s cast (including Skitch Henderson and Andy Williams) and two audience
members. It’s funny and incredibly silly, and not quite what I ever thought of
when I thought of Lord Buckley:

An appearance on Ed Sullivan in 1955, where he again does a “gimmick
piece” — I wonder if he chose to do these vaudeville turns, or if the producers
asked him to avoid his “hipsemantic” routines. Here he does a bit in which he
makes four people “dummies” for a dialogue that owes something to both
Amos and Andy (the TV version) and his skill with hip talk.
The participants are the Canadian comedy duo Wayne & Shuster, Trudy Adams,
and the old human statue himself, Ed Sullivan.

The same generous poster has provided us with the Lord in
his only movie appearance, in the 1952 comedy We’re Not Married.
The scene finds an uncredited Buckley playing a dignified radio producer for married couple
(or are they really — read the title!) Fred Allen and Ginger Rogers:

The final offering used to be available in its entirety, but
is now up only in a “remixed” version, intended to “soup up” the material.
Buckley provided the voice of the VERY beat-sounding “Wildman of Wildsville" in
a “Beany and Cecil” cartoon (where they visit travel past places named for
Lenny and Mort Sahl!).

Scenes from the cartoon are seen in this remix video,
which adds very *loud * interpolations. (The poster does note that the
character was done again, but with Scatman Crothers providing the vocal.)

Buckley’s last line said it all: "People are the true
flowers of life, and it has been a most precious pleasure to have temporarily
strolled in your garden."

For invaluable reading material, knock your lobes
over at the Lord Buckley website, which has transcriptions, a full discography,
and interviews with those who knew him (and one Studs Terkel chat with the Lord
himself). The video links aren’t fully updated, though (the new items above
should be added).